PPTX Presentation Skill

Anthropic's official PPTX skill teaches Claude to create, read, and edit PowerPoint (.pptx) presentations — building polished slide decks and pitch decks, extracting their content, and applying real design and quality-assurance discipline.

What is the PPTX skill?

The PPTX skill is one of the document skills that powers Claude's file capabilities. It handles any task where a .pptx file is the input, the output, or both: creating decks from scratch, reading and parsing slides, editing existing presentations, combining or splitting slide files, and working with templates, layouts, speaker notes, and comments. It pairs the right tools — markitdown for text extraction, pptxgenjs for generation, and unpack/pack scripts for XML editing — with opinionated design guidance so the output does not look like generic AI slides.

What it does

• Creates slide decks, pitch decks, and presentations from scratch with pptxgenjs
• Reads and extracts text from any .pptx with python -m markitdown presentation.pptx
• Edits existing presentations by unpacking, manipulating slides, and repacking the XML
• Works with templates, layouts, speaker notes, and comments
• Renders thumbnail grids and converts slides to images for visual QA
• Applies content-informed color palettes, font pairings, and layout patterns

How it works

Claude loads the skill's SKILL.md and routes by task. To read a deck it runs markitdown; to create one without a template it follows pptxgenjs.md; to edit a template it follows editing.md — analyzing the template with thumbnail.py, then unpack → manipulate → edit → clean → pack. The skill carries a detailed Design Ideas section: pick a bold, topic-specific palette with one dominant color, commit to a visual motif, give every slide a visual element, and avoid tells like accent lines under titles. Its required QA loop treats the first render as wrong on purpose — run a content check with markitdown (grepping for leftover lorem/placeholder text), convert slides to images, and use fresh-eyes subagents to hunt for overlaps, overflow, low contrast, and misalignment, fixing and re-verifying until a clean pass.

Who it's for

Anyone who uses Claude to produce or revise PowerPoint files: founders building pitch decks, marketers and consultants making client presentations, analysts turning data into slides, and teams that need to extract content from existing .pptx files for summaries or emails. It runs wherever Claude has a code/file environment — Claude.ai (paid plans), Claude Code, and the Claude API.

What you can build

• Investor pitch decks with a cohesive palette and repeated visual motif
• Client presentations built from a corporate template and layouts
• Data slides with large stat callouts, comparison columns, and timelines
• Decks with speaker notes and reviewer comments baked in
• Text summaries extracted from existing presentations

Why it matters

Most generated slides are forgettable — plain bullets on white, accent lines under every title, placeholder text left behind. This skill encodes Anthropic's production approach to both the mechanics of the .pptx format and the design and QA judgment that separate a usable deck from an obvious AI artifact. The result is presentations that look intentionally designed and survive a real visual review, not just valid XML.

1. Install in Claude Code

Register the Anthropic skills marketplace, then install the document skills plugin:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

Or install just this skill with the skills CLI:

npx skills add anthropics/skills --skill pptx

2. Use it

On Claude.ai paid plans these document skills are already available. Just ask:

Use the PPTX skill to build a 10-slide pitch deck for my startup.

Or: "Read deck.pptx and summarize each slide, then add speaker notes to slides 3 and 4."